Wednesday, 25 November 2009

My apologies for the lack of updates recently; I hope the wait will be worthwhile.

Developing roguelikes is unique in that you can reasonably be assured that if you wait long enough, someone else will come up with the solution. I added cellular automaton driven cave generation to Unangband earlier this year from an article on Rogue Basin, but never fixed one major issue with this algorithm, which is connecting the disconnected regions that this method generates. Fortunately, Ray aka Bear has come up with an elegant solution in this Post-processing to ensure map connectivity post on rgrd.

You may also want to check out another roguelike development blog (added to the roguelike links on the right) If Error Throw New Brick, where Chris Hamons is working on his roguelike Mage Crawl.

I've also played a few Unangband sorcerers recently, and realised that the class doesn't have a strong starting game. Unlike other Unangband mages, Sorcerers start with only a single attack spell, which means any creatures which resist this attack will kill the player quickly. In this example, the Sorcerer has a psychic attack spell (Mind Thrust) to which mindless creatures are immune. In the first few levels, this consists of insects (which have 'weird' minds) and plants (mushroom patches, molds etc.)

I played around with adding a second attack spell, and making the sorcerer trap spells accessible earlier, but neither felt the right approach - they ended up playing like other mages.

Instead, I've gone with adding a first level Charm Plants spell. This hopefully won't be over powering - almost all plants are stationary, and where they move, they do so by breeding, which allied monsters won't do. And it means the player has a more flexible and indirect attack method with which they may be able to snare insects and other mindless enemies. Which is the intention I had with this class all along.